31 Jan 2011

Book Recommendation: The Victorian Internet

I’ve been hearing about this book literally for years now, and just got
around to reading it this month: The Victorian Internet
(non-referral link) by Tom Standage. I shouldn’t have waited so long.

Who or where I heard about the book from initially I can’t remember,
but I was reminded of it by a mention recently on MetaFilter, had the
‘free sample’ sent to my Kindle, and ended up buying it while waiting
in the departure area of IAD last week.

It’s not a long read, but it’s an interesting look at the history of
the telegraph, which I thought I had a fairly good understanding of
but in truth knew very little about. If you want a companion book to
go with it (long flight?), I’d say that Erik Larson’s
Thunderstruck is a good choice, although it’s a bit more
historical-fictiony, since it essentially picks up a few years after
the period that Standage examines in The Victorian Internet.
(Thunderstruck deals with the development and impact of radio,
mostly during the early spark-gap era.)

Anyway, Standage writes a nice little book and even if it does tend to
hit the reader over the head a bit hard with the
telegraph-network/Internet comparisons, they’re mostly apt.

Although Standage doesn’t come right out and say this, one of the
reasons I suspect that the parallels about workers in the early
telegraph industry and the pre-DotBomb tech industry (keep in mind,
Standage’s book was written in 1997) work so well was that both
involved skills that were so in-demand that employers were willing to
overlook a multitude of issues in potential employees, and workplaces
developed a colorful culture as a result.

But the real reason to read the book is as food for thought and as a
counterpoint to the frequently “chronocentric” (Standage’s term)
claims about the unique or unparalleled nature of current
technological developments.

About the only negative – and this is expressed in the Amazon reviews
– is that the Kindle edition is really pooly done. It’s pretty
obviously just some sort of OCR dumped out there for purchase without
even the benefit of a single read-through by a human. It’s full of
I’s standing in for 1’s, and the drop caps at the beginning of each
chapter seem to be a frequent source of problems. It’s certainly
readable, but a bit embarrassing on Amazon’s part.